WEG at pedestrian speed

Eating out on the Legacy Trail

Editor’s Note: The paper hired Northrupp to do a serious story on WEG, for which NoC lent him its home during the Games. He came back from his New Mexico vacation to a thoroughly destroyed backyard, starving dogs and this manuscript, part of which is serialized below. We can make no claims about any of the actions relayed below by Center, except for those verifiable through other sources. We would not run this at all, except for the late date at which this was made known to us, and the writer’s insistence that I signed a contract giving him “full access,” which he takes as full access to this paper. We offer this piece by Rupp only as a poor example of realist fiction, historical short story writing or local color regionalist writing.

By Northrupp Center

We were somewhere on the Legacy Trail, near the edge of the Horse Park, when the mushrooms began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “Gortimer, I think we should get off the path for a moment.” For some time I had been peering intently at the dry fall skies, watching micro-currents of wind crash into each other, a series of chaotic pixelated energy vectors plotted on a moving 4-D grid, which had been guiding me along for the past 100 yards.

“Good idea,” he replied. “I see you’ve read the signs.”

Past Gortimer, my eyes left the sky long enough to mark them, two simple affairs, offering friendly advice for the bike and pedestrian hordes the city hopes to one day attract here. For continuous participation….Don’t forget hydration.

I took out my moleskin and scratched a gross approximation. A week earlier, I agreed to cover the World Equestrian Games—the Olympics of Equestrian sports, it had been widely reported—for North of Center. Equestrian sports, for any non-sports fans, are the third largest in France, falling just behind soccer and tennis. The French go absolutely berserk over the events, which run from endurance riding, what one insider has described as “80 Kentucky Derbies at one-third the speed” packed into a single race spanning the entire day over inaccessible private property, to dressage and driving and vaulting.

Lexington’s landing of the Games, the first in America during WEG’s storied 20 year run spanning five other cities in Europe, was cause for celebration. In the sports year 2010, local media were reporting, this would be the second biggest sporting event to occur anywhere in North America. Forget a weekend, any weekend, of home-football games in the states of Alabama, Texas or Florida. Disregard the sporting event known as March Madness. Fuck the Super Bowl. In 2010, smart money says that the second biggest will be WEG. In Lexington.

And with such great promise comes the responsibility. From the beginning, the papers provided the narrative. The world’s eye, not to mention its people, would soon be upon Lexington. Putting aside, momentarily, the issues of homelessness and massive government giveaways to dying industries, the paper spent a lot time pondering the question: could the mid-market city with big-time aspirations actually pull it off and arrive…somewhere, or would its small-thinking, small-city citizens fuck things up again for the rest of us?

It was an intriguing story line for a sports journalist.

A perfect brand storm

Rise up unite, come to the fight

for the duped and working poor…Wes Houp

I had been amassing a sizable file of newspaper clippings on the WEG since 2007 while in town for other matters, when I heard a tip on them from a bartender at the Pub. Over draughts of Guinness, he explained to me that every hotel in the area was already booked clear through to Cincinnati. Even better, horse people who passed through the mall-side authentic Irish pub where he worked had been telling him of the outrageous prices that European horse people were willing to pay.

It made sense in 2007, when it seemed everyone was cashing in. After sitting much of the past two decades out of the large-scale speculative capital bubble, Lexington had hit, it seemed, the supply/demand jackpot. It was a perfect match. The city would come off as urban global cool (three brand identities currently in great demand), one with a distinct sporting identity to complement its basketball crazy…and it could make shit loads of money scraping shekels off the jackals dumb enough to fall for it all and participate in the whole thing.

I figured I’d get a jump start on the research, lure me a whale in the magazine industry, and make my own honest buck off the WEG gravy train. A rising tide lifts all ships, no?

After failing to interest a single sports magazine in coverage for the Games—including my losing out to a local first talent for a feature piece in Garden and Gun magazine, I settled for an all-access gig at the paper. NoC editor and longtime friend Danny Mayer had heeded the advice of local author Ed McClanahan—get the hell out of Dodge—and with his wife left to visit friends in New Mexico. I was given the keys to the NoC manse for 10 days and left $200 in expenses. My only obligations: cover the WEG story, feed and water the dogs. And owing to an unfortunate roll of the bocce ball on the last, drunken night before Mayer’s flight west, I also had to apply five coats of a natural, though still highly toxic, Waterlox finish over the entire downstairs of the house.

I had spent the ensuing eight afternoons preparing and rubbing tung oil into the NoC floorboards. The work left me woozy and it effectively denied me access to the house for the day while things dried. I spent my days outside, watering and feeding the dogs, collecting wood from the alleyways for evening fires in the backyard and taking good advantage of the city’s WEGer induced downtown open container laws.

By the last Wednesday night of WEG, I began to panic. I had no story. Nothing was really happening. I hadn’t watched a single event. In all my research, I hadn’t counted on caring so little for the sport; I couldn’t bring myself to watch a thing.

About this time, dues ex machina, Gortimer reminded me of our planned WEG outing. We would enter the Kentucky Horse Park by way of the newly opened Legacy Trail, and we would consume as much of our bountiful fall Kentucky harvest—and others’ harvests, too—as humanly possible on the hike to the WEGer horse-feast. If the horse-people were gathering in pastoral Fayette County, we felt the pedestrian culture should be represented as well.

On consumption road

The Europeans, especially, want Americana…Wayne Musick, owner of the Boot Store in Lexington, KY

Messages on the Legacy Trail

After a morning walk to Third Street for the day’s paper and to Sunrise for some comestibles, it was back home for a quick pre-game sampling of two local harvests, The Diesel and a local variant named Chad’s Peak, and a meet-up with Gortimer. He had arranged a pedicab to drop us off at the Lexmark parking lot, where we picked up the newly finished Legacy Trail, a paved path that connected the north side YMCA to the Kentucky Horse Park, about 9 miles away. After crossing New Circle, we descended into the backside of a small residential neighborhood, their backyard private fences no match for the path’s superior altitude. It was here we got out the first batch of mushrooms, a real local first product grown by a Boyle County DIYer, and spread them over some bars of hot chile chocolate.

“Feed the mind, feed the body,” Gortimer uttered before downing his late-morning snack.

The trail soon opened onto Citation across from UK’s Coldstream business campus. I paused to pen the first of the trail’s many road-signs into the muleskin. If everything comes your way…You are in the wrong place.

“Northrupp…don’t forget hydration...off the trail. Quit fucking writing in that thing. Come back to me, man.”

I snapped to attention immediately, pivoted left beyond the For continuous participation sign, tucked the moleskin back into my pocket, and went tromping towards a small dirt road that would eventually lead up a rise into an already harvested corn field. “Right-O, G-Man. Time for a Pumpkin Ale, a smoke, some lunch.”

I patted my black leather satchel, a dollar pickup at a forgotten garage sale some ten years earlier. It was, admittedly, too small for the task at hand, but I didn’t know what to expect on our trip. The Games were corporate all the way. Alltech, a local bio-technology corporation dabbling in alcohol production, and its founder Pearse Lyons had put up over $32 million in sponsorship and other financial help to sponsor and run the Games. Booths to sell wares at the 16 day event were going for upwards of $15,000. Cost for a grounds pass, to just enter and see the free shit, cost $25 alone. There would be blood to pay, I thought, as everyone extracts their ounce of flesh. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get patted down, ball swiped even. No need to bring anything nice.

“Your muttering to yourself, Northrupp. Nobody here cares about ball swipes. You’ve been paranoid all day, man, since this morning when you thought the secret police were tracking us in the alleyway. As if the police care about a fucking horse writer for a nothing paper. It’s just us up here…relax and take a look at the view.”

Gortimer had a point. The view was exquisite, vintage Fayette County countryside. Below us, our middle landscape, the Legacy Trail rolled its way north over a rise and out of the picture, presumably on its way to the Horse Park; in the background across the trail below the edge tract of Coldstream, even nw with our elevated vantage point, still vacant and awaiting tenants, grass running up a hill and disappearing into the sky and its wind vectors. The lack of development on Coldstream made the place seem queerly nineteenth century, removed from the city yet less than two miles from two separate interstates.

I grabbed my bag, which was bursting with a sampling of the region’s harvest. In it I carried six bagels and an uncut French bread from Sunrise, a couple of containers filled with capicola and provolone cheese mini-sandwiches, a salt and pepper shaker, an eye dropper half-filled with olive oil, an assortment of mushrooms, three bags stuffed with assorted teas, newly harvested green genovese basil and the last of last year’s dried salvia/wild dagga herb mix, and a sugar baby watermelon.

I was relieved for us to begin consuming our way into all the weight. The goodies were heavy, and they had been competing for space with other sundry necessaries: the day’s Herald-Leader, a couple old copies of NoC in case I needed to procure credentials, six Belle’s Pumpkin Ales, a flask of Svedka and $75, divided up into three bills.

Gortimer and I commenced to gorging on everything we could consume and to making plans for our final valiant push to the Horse Park.

This story may be serialized in future issues. Northrupp Center holds the Hunter S. Thompson/Charles Kuralt endowed chair of journalism at the Open University of Rio de Janeiro (OURdJ). He splits his time between there and Lexington, KY.